Structure granaire, réduction du NADP et photophosphorylation des chloroplastes isolés de feuilles d'orge

Summary

Barley chloroplasts (Hordeum vulgare L.) have been isolated in aqueous medium by previously described techniques which preserve the outer plastid membrane in numerous chloroplasts. Thus “intact” chloroplasts are concentrated in “Class I” fraction and “non intact” in “Class II” fraction. A third type, “broken Class I”, is obtained by the action of a very dilute buffer solution.

The observation of freeze-etched preparations has shown that the main distinctive character between the two classes is not so much the presence or the absence of the outer plastid membrane, as it was assumed, as the state of the thylakoids. In Class I chloroplasts grana are shrunken, in those of Class II, grana are swollen. In both cases the outer membrane may or may not be preserved.

The breakage of chloroplasts resulting from treatment with osmotic shocks is due to the dilatation of the extra-lamellar matrix. The swelling of intra-thylakoidal volumes resulting from such a treatment is much less important.

It is shown that Class I chloroplasts have a very low NADP reductase activity which is strongly increased after the chloroplasts are broken by osmotic shocks. Such a treatment is without any effect on Class II chloroplasts, which always exhibit a low NADP reductase activity.

The situation is rather different in regard to photophosphorylation. It is also lower in Class II than in Class I, but after breakage by osmotic shocks the increase of this activity is weak, and much less significant than the increase observed in NADP reduction. The compression and cohesion of the thylakoids is not required for high photophosphorylation activity with artificial electron acceptors such as PMS. In this case cyclic photophosphorylation is higher in Class II than in Class I.